Confusion and doubt, too, and a childlike neediness, seeking consolation or reassurance. And that relentless desire to overcome. Maybe a twelve-year-old boy determined to fight off the effects of the badly formed heart that was killing him, frightened, needing comfort?
Robert? Robert Linn Dodge? she called to it in her mind.
Tommy's body stumbled hard on a knee-high rock and went down. Cree's eyes had adjusted to the starlit dark, enough to see that when he got up, his movements were slack and disjointed. Not as if Tommy were fighting the ghost, but as if his body were simply too worn out from the days and nights of warring to obey.
They were getting pretty far from the hogan now. Cree could barely see the building's dark mass, a hundred yards back; the light from the lantern in the shed was mostly eclipsed by intervening junipers. She began having second thoughts about letting the narrative play itself out. It wouldn't be good to go too far in country neither she nor the ghost knew. There were cliffs here. Ellen and Ray might not hear a call for help.
She picked up her pace to close the gap between them.
Always east. Brother would have been heading east as he desperately tried to get back to the ravine. He'd be proud he'd caught one of the goats, maybe that was the cockiness, a young man proving his daring and worthiness. He'd be afraid of the approaching soldiers. He'd be apologetic for disobeying his father's orders not to go back down the ravine.
They were getting too far away. Tommy's movements were weak, but the ghost seemed tireless. Cree couldn't wait any longer for a confrontation. Scrambling in the dark, she flanked the ghost at a distance and came around to head it off. She stopped ten feet away, directly in front of the dark form.
"Shinnai?" she called out loud. She conjured in her mind the sense of the girl's mental world, her feeling for her brother.
Tommy took several more toppling steps, stopped, and swayed uncertainly. Now all the ghost felt was doubt and fear. "What are you doing here?" he said breathlessly. Abruptly he put up his hands as if warding off a blow and immediately rage exploded him. He swung his fist at Cree and caught the side of her head. She didn't fall, but it knocked her off balance and rattled her and she tried to dodge him, but it was too late, she was moving too slowly. Tommy lunged again and she had to grab his arms. He growled like an animal, but there was little force in his efforts. They fell over and rolled, Cree turning her face away from the clawing hands, her mouth filling with grit.
"Tommy!" she shouted. "Tommy, stop him!"
Its movements faltered. She tried to push it away and partially succeeded, dragged her upper body out from under. Twisting to look as its fists thudded weakly on her back, she saw that Tommy's body appeared to be fighting with an invisible being. The ghost had drifted askew between worlds. In another few seconds it flailed hugely as pain exploded inside it. Its stomach, its chest, everything bursting. The body began convulsing in regular waves. Cree broke free, scrambled a few feet away, fell down as the pain consumed her. She rolled to look at the Tommy thing. It was fighting for its life. It couldn't seem to breathe.
That thought panicked her and she groped in her pocket for her key ring flashlight. When she put the spot of light on Tommy, she could see the asynchronous breathing rolling his chest side to side, the gaping mouth as the lungs exchanged air. Still she couldn't move. The sense of unrelenting purpose burned in the ghost's mind. It wouldn't surrender. Cree felt its will encompass her, its body spirit irradiate her. The ghost felt itself lying on its back as the ground seemed to rise and fall and shake. It was wounded or sick, dying, yet unwilling to relinquish its life or purpose. It was overpowering her. The ghost or Tommy was looking at her desperately and saying something without breath. She felt the word in her own mouth: away. Then one eye fixed on her with enormous effort, and the ghost said it again. This time it sounded more like awake. Was the ghost telling her to go away? Was it pleading to awaken? It wants to come back. Then the power of it waned a little and she pulled back from the edge. Tommy's body was starting to die as it suffocated.
"Ellen! Ray!" she screamed. "Help me, please!" She looked desperately in the direction of the invisible sheep sheds, waving her tiny light back and forth over her head. The ghost or Tommy was still moving its mouth that way. "Are you saying 'away'?" she asked it. "Are you wanting to wake up? Please tell me!" But the rolling chest had gone still and the staring eye turned fishlike and almost without life. It could no longer move.
She bent and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She shoved on the motionless chest, exhaled into the slack mouth, reared up, shoved again. She screamed and waved the light and this time heard a clank from the darkness and knew immediately that someone had knocked over the coffeepot down at the shed. "Over here!" she yelled. She blew into Tommy's mouth, pushed on his stubborn chest. Waved the tiny flashlight. Heard voices.
It took a while to get him back to the hogan. They waited until his breathing stabilized and until the snapping arm movement had ceased. Ray and Dan kept watch as Tommy slept. Ellen led Cree back to the shed.
Neither said anything as Ellen heated some water on the fire and used it to wash the scratches on her face. They weren't severe. When Cree checked her watch, she found it was almost two a.m.
Ellen finished up her face and sat back on her haunches. "Better?"
"Much better. Thank you, Ellen." Cree reached out a hand to touch her brown cheek, cherishing her. She kept her right hand in the pocket of her jacket. She had placed it there carefully with her left to keep it from hanging loose from her shoulder. It wasn't responding. It wasn't there. It wasn't actually her arm at all. Her real arm, she was sure, was unaccountably wrapped around behind her, tucked hard along her spine as if she'd slipped her hand deep into the waistband of her jeans and couldn't bring it out. The feeling was so gnarled and knotted it made her nauseous. Some part of the entity's body ghost had entered her. Or she had empathized with it so much she'd inherited its condition. Whatever the mechanics were. It didn't matter, and she didn't want Ellen to worry. They needed to hold out here until morning and hope that Julieta would come and the ghost would reveal itself to her and they could somehow let it go. No, she decided. Looking at Tommy after they'd laid him among his blankets, she'd seen how the weeks of warring had sapped him. There'd been unceasing doubt and anxiety, and the exertion of the fighting and convulsing. He had nearly suffocated several times. Worst of all, his body had relived someone's act of death innumerable times. There was little left of him, not even physically; even animated by the ghost's preposterous power, his fighting had been feeble. They couldn't wait for Julieta. As soon as daylight allowed, they'd have to get him back to the hospital, where at least his body could be kept alive. Whatever they might do to him there, this wasn't working. This couldn't go on.
They sat for a few minutes, warming themselves on the snapping juniper-twig fire Ellen had rekindled. Cree felt crushing disappointment at her inability to enter the ghost's world. To heal Tommy. She had promised Julieta and Tommy, and she had failed them.
Still, as Pop always said, It ain't over till it's over, and it's never over. Until morning came, she had to keep trying.
"Ellen," she said hoarsely. "The ghost, or maybe it's Tommy, says things sometimes. Have you heard it?"
"Yeah. Before you came, a couple of times."
"Did you hear it say 'away' or 'awake'?"
"Yeah. Only I thought it was a Navajo word, `awee,'" Ellen ended the sound with a glottal stop that could almost have served as a k.
"That's it exactly! What does it mean?"
" 'Baby.'"
"Does that mean anything to you under the circumstances?"
Ellen shook her head. She poked at the fire with a stick as Cree tried to imagine what the word might imply, or who had spoken it. Could it have been Tommy, somehow knowing his possessor was Julieta's child, her baby? Or the chindi itself, understanding its plight and struggling to express the tidal pull toward its mother? It didn't make sense. But if either was true, seeing the ghost with Julieta could well reveal everything. If she got here in time.